Celebrating the marriage of contraries in private poems of love. Departure explores intimacy and separation between mother and daughter, husband and wife, artist and muse, woman and demon lover. In a wide range of verse forms, it contemplates individual and communal mourning founded in scenes of violence the fury in Virgil's Aeneid, the layers of conquest and desolation in Sicily, the trenches of World War I, the complexities of a contemporary American marriage. It is a book haunted, as well by dangerous gods. Poseidon the Farth-Shaker, ecstatic and destructive Aphrodite. Apollo. Dionysus. Ancient and modera eras, sacred and earthly forces, personal and societal despair are all held in the are of this exquisite collection by one of our finest poets.

Book jacket.